The Assembly Building had become the subject of my worst nightmares. I had, of course, been there many times—it was where Mort brought the long sections of steel on his mobile crane, but I had never stayed, jumping off the mudguard to unhook the chains, and back on again, ready to go. Mort would hang around, chatting with this bloke or that, but I stuck to my mudguard like glue. I did not like it there. It was a world of heat and choking dust, of comtinual noise where everything seemed to have sharp edges. I knew I would hate it there.
Bert gave me a pair of overalls made of thick uncomfortable fabric, and a pair of rough leather gloves. I was put with the crew on number three assembly, and got to gather up the metal off cuts and carry them to the bins, or hold the ends of things while they were welded, or help load and unload the trucks.
There was more than one beast that would have remained in the scrub and died. They do that sometimes in droughts. Weak-spirited animals give up the struggle and wait passively for death to overtake them. The red cow was one of those that can weather the worst of droughts, marching at night to water and pushing out to the farthermost corners of the paddock by day, finding the occasional bite of feed for lack of which less enterprising cattle die. When darkness came her spirits were the first to revive, and, lowing softly to her calf to follow, she would set off through the scrub. The others would struggle to their feet, drawn by the strength of one.
Man-shy, by Frank Dalby Davidson, might be the oddest book ever written. A red heifer, just another cow really, tells the story of its life on a remote cattle station, of the days in the great herds, the round-up and how it escapes the butcher’s knife and flees into the wild. It told you all you could possibly want to know about what it is to be bovine—the horror of being branded, the confinement of fences and joy of freedom, the comfort of the herd. But mostly it’s just standing around eating grass. An extraordinary thing.
